Digital communications presently supply solutions to users in ways that are completely divorced from their business context. A particular item of communication provides little or no inherent understanding of how that communication furthers the purpose and intent of the group or enterprise. In other words, an email (electronic mail) inbox collects email messages about all topics, both business and personal. The email application itself is not discerning about topic, priority, or context beyond perhaps rudimentary “message filters” that will look for certain key words or people, and then place those items in target folders. Generally, the application simply presents a sequential list of messages received. Similarly, a fax machine receives fax pages in sequence. The fax machine is not discerning about topic, priority, or context, and simply outputs fax pages. Once received, it remains the task of the recipient to sort, categorize, and organize these items of communication in ways most meaningful to that person. The organization part of the task generally occurs outside the context of the particular communications tool itself.
Typical methods for organization of communications are limited and fragmented. For example, for an email, the recipient may either leave all the email in the inbox or move it to another electronic folder. For a fax, the recipient is likely to place that received fax in a file folder that is identified by project name or name of recipient. These typical methods of organizing communications are wholly inadequate for a number of reasons. The recipient must do all the work of organization and categorization of the communications rather than the system itself doing that work. Automation of the organization of communications is non-existent. The linkage between business strategy and an individual act of communication, a leadership priority, is non-existent. With respect to categorization, the items themselves rarely apply to only one topic of interest. As such, under current systems, the items would need to be manually stored in multiple locations (either electronic or “brick and mortar” folders). For example, a letter faxed to a sales manager may contain information about contact addresses, market intelligence data, specific product requests, and financial accounting.
Data items often relate to organizational issues for which one or more work groups need access; access that is denied when the recipient “buries” that item in his/her personal filing system, electronic or otherwise. Thus, the sharing of knowledge in this context is prohibitive.
Prior art communications tools do not know the business and/or personal context(s) within which files are created and used. For example, a person may create three files in a word processor, one relating to sales, the second relating to operations, and the third relating to a son's football team. However, the word processor itself has no way of knowing to automatically store those three files in at least three different places. Insofar as security and privacy are concerned, the applications and associated file storage methods are generally insecure, not conforming to a single, dependable security model.
Known software applications create and store files outside of a contextual framework. For example, when a user creates a word processing file using a conventional word processor application, the user typically must select a single folder within which to store that file. The file may be stored in an existing folder or the user may create a new folder to receive the file. This file management method is known as Lightweight Directory Application Protocol (LDAP). LDAP borrowed the physical world paper file management scheme where a machine/application creates files, stores those files in individual folders, and stores those folders in cabinets. Under this scheme, context is completely independent of the application. File context is limited to the decision made by the user about the folder in which the file should be stored. The user decision does not adequately represent or reflect the true context of the file given that the file may contain information that could reasonable be stored in multiple folders.
LDAP systems are suited for smaller one-to-many and many-to-one relationships. For example, an e-mail message to ten recipients is a one-to-many relationship, while ten customers, sending orders to a single vendor exemplifies a many-to-one relationship. In the case of the former, the e-mail is stored in an Outbox, and the ten recipients store the received message in their respective folders, called an Inbox. In the latter case, the ten received orders are placed in an Orders folder for the associated the product.
Conventional systems are designed to allow multiple users to access the same file for collaboration purposes; however, this feature does not change the basic one-to-many and many-to-one storage paradigm. Conventional systems only attempt to optimize it.
Another limitation of LDAP is that little or no information is contained within the file about the user and, the context and circumstances of the user at the time the file was created. The people elements of an organization are simply too multi-dimensional for the limitations of conventional systems. Current processes designed to add context to files, such as a metadata tagging approach, involve having a knowledge officer view files after they have been stored and create metadata tags with additional key words associated with the file for search purposes.
The best that existing technology has done is to respond to niche requirements where automation made sense: telephone switching, voice mail, e-mail, file transfer, paging, and file storage, for example. The trend is toward a convergence of the technologies, but convergence becomes an enormous problem with these legacy systems that are now encumbered by outdated data handling and storage models that are mainframe and/or hierarchical in nature.
Notwithstanding the usefulness of the above-described methods, a need still exists for a communications tool that associates files generated by applications with individuals, groups, and topical context automatically.